This month has been 30 days of solid machining!
So we thought we’d take you on a tour of the main machine shop and show you the parts that are getting milled and turned.
With a little extra treat at the end for anyone that’s bought a Desktop Workstation.
Let get stuck into it.
Turning Our Balls
Here’s a stainless steel ball joint in the first stage of machining, where the first operation is completed. This makes the blank part ready for the ball to be machined later on.
So we can show you guys what’s happening we have to ask the operators to lay off the coolant; they REALLY don’t like this as it puts extra wear on the tooling and creates a nice bit of smoke for the camera 
So as soon as we get what we need, the deluge is turned back on!
The Brass Nubbin
Here’s another component that makes up the ball mount! It’s one of two brass handles that helps lock the ball in place, giving you access to all those awkward angles when you’re painting dragons. This operation is showing the threads being cut, a tiny chamfer on the end being put on and then parted off, ready to be packed away for assembly.
The Giant’s Causeway… Now in Brass!
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to glimpse the oddly uniform geometry of the Giant’s Causeway reaching out of the ocean as the waves retreat… Then you’ll probably think this is a bit of a stretch to compare it to BUT this did give me the same fuzzy feeling the first time it was blasted with the airline, so I’m sticking by it!
These shiny guys are the Brass Parallel Jaws and to make things more economical, most of the machining is done from one big plate of brass so the machine can just be left alone to work, blasting through brass completely blind. Robots are great.
Taking The Plunge
Here’s another example of an over confident machine. Raised by its parents to believe it can do anything, this absolute workhorse is 100% committed to making each and every hole at ridiculous speeds. This never gets old to watch.
This is an aluminium base going through some of the final operations before it’s sent off for finishing and plating.
Part Finished Parts!
All that milling excitement has resulted in the creation of many parts over the last month. Here’s a sneaky peek at our hordes of bits, that are quickly becoming a throng… or possibly a swarm. I’ll have to check back on my Heroes of Might and Magic references for that one.
Smooth Fractals
These part machined aluminium fractals are really stacking up! These are now ready for their second operation on the back of the part to finish it off, prior to surface finishing and plating.
The Great Sea Of Knurl
The result of the lathe running over night non stop making ball mount handle parts. Here they are all finished ready for assembly.
You can create literally 1000’s of components in a very short space of time with no input if the part is; designed properly for the machine, you have a decent bar feed and a good CNC lathe. Unfortunately the things we tend to design are usually not so simple… like the below… but we’ll take this little win and move on to machining more complex bits!
Quick Releases First Parts
We now have the first quick release jaws produced! These brass parts are looking great and they’re so shiny you can’t even tell these guys are brass from this shot!
Enter The Fractal
A fun optical illusion as the first operation has been finished on all these final stage fractals, getting lined up to have the back machined.
Stainless Drive Screws
The first stub shafts have been machined for the Quick Release. These are part machined and still need a few operations on them before they are useable, but you can see them taking shape!
Before There Were Balls
The results from the video above showing the ball joints going through first stage machining. Here the parts are all stacking up ready for the next stage, the ballening.
Easily one of my favourite operations, making balls on CNC lathes really is a joy to watch, so I’ll try my best to capture some balls being machined for next month’s update.
Metal Biscuits
Here we have aluminium base plates stacking up. These are getting boxed and batched together so they are ready for surface finishing and hard anodising in a few months.
Desktop Workstation Silicone Upgrade
After the campaign ended and we started getting the desktop workstation in to manufacture, we spotted there could be an opportunity to make things a little better.
When we started there were two work surfaces in the workstation, but as we were getting samples from our suppliers of the cutting mat it turned out that the better mats were all slightly thinner and these were just out-performing everything.
This gave us a thought; what if we used all this new found space and made an additional non-slip mat that could work with the other two?
It turns out what you get… is this!
Not being satisfied with a mere square of non-slip material, we have made this from industrial grade pure silicone and kitted it out with a whole bunch of little surface pockets so that it can double up as a soldering mat or assembly workspace.
These arrived yesterday and we think it really finished off the set, stopping the other two surfaces slipping around when used outside of the workstation and being a handy little area all on its own.
Even better, we’ve managed to get this into the main production run so they will be included with every desktop workstation we have sold on Kickstarter and beyond.